About 10 billion years ago, a black hole decided it needed to eat. The meal, a star roughly 30 times the mass of the Sun, didn’t stand a chance. As the black hole ripped it apart, the event unleashed a flare brighter than 10 trillion Suns, the most powerful ever recorded.

The light from that eruption has been traveling ever since, only reaching Earth in 2018. Astronomers identified the source as J2245+3743, a supermassive black hole sitting in a distant galaxy. Within months, it brightened by a factor of 40 and reached a peak intensity that dwarfed every known black-hole flare on record. “The energetics show this object is very far away and very bright,” Caltech astrophysicist Matthew Graham, lead author of the study in Nature Astronomy, told Caltech News. “This is unlike any AGN we’ve ev

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